I think OpenDoc's failure had less to do with vendors wanting to lock cusomters into a single monolithic platform and more to do with it's inferior implementation. It was a huge, bloated, memory pig, it was slow and it was very late to market.
In opensource, competition is very important and it will become more important in the future, we need it to keep moving forward. What we also need to do is to keep components as components and let each package focus on being the package that it is and nothing more and then tie packages together with things like bonobo, kobjects, xpcom and opendoc like technologies.
That's sweet. That is like business school poetry or something. Or maybe something Data would say. Where do they get that kind of stuff, is there a book I can get? I'd like to start including phrases like that in my vocabulary and probably some of my poetry.
I can say that being the cryotpgeek that I am, if I was going to be a thief and take something I'd want to take an Enigma machine. It would be a bad ass piece to have in my study. My hat is off to the gent for ripping it off. At least he didn't take something useless like a painting or some jewel laced golden artifact, he stole something that was calssified for years.
That's funny. I'm going to start walking up to Brits and Canadians and asking them how things are going 'down under' Then asking "are you sure you're not Australian" when they say that they aren't. I think this is a prime chance for Jeremy, he can live a debaucherous life and pretend to be Austrailian and make the whole lot of 'em look bad.
I think they will just burn up.
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R.I.P. Iridium
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· Score: 4
I'm not a legal expert but... At my new job I have a TV on my desk and I generally keep it on CNBC all day to track the market and my stocks and it's the most exceptable channel to keep it on while coding (a few guys can do cartoons but it's suspect because the boss knows you want to watch them, nobody wants to admit the love CNBC) They've been talking about irridium lately too.
As it goes, last Tuesday they talked about Irridium because some guy was bailing on them, it's the guy who owns vodafon. Anyhow, if nobody buys irridium then they will stop driving the satallites and after a while they will all enter the Earth's atmosphere and burn up. A few of them might make it a while but they will all suffer the same fate eventually. CNBC made it sound like on March 17 they will turn the satallites off and just let them drift.
It's really kind of a bummer, I love the idea of a universal mobile phone. There are tons of applications for it. Irridium has been mismanaged since the get-go though. Nobody is going to be a $3000 portable phone and pay $8 a minute for service except for in the most extreme circumstances or they are the most reckless rich guys around. From what I've heard the line quality wasn't so hot either. My PCS phone works just about everywhere I've been in this country and I could easily buy a few more and use call forwarding in other jurisdictions if I needed it for much less than Irridium. There are also alternative satallite world phone ventures that are going on. I also think there are some laws in the US about satallite communication. I think NORAD or some other government agency will track your satallite and possibly even guide it for you if you for some small fee, that fee being something like they have access to your uplinks. I'm not 100% sure on it, but I suspect that once Irridium shuts down they will make sure the satallites cannot be used by anybody. I think there are a number of fears about people sniffing intelligence data to our spy satallites or determining where our spy satallites are. Perhaps someone else in the know knows the details on this.
Whatever the reasons, I'm pretty sure they will just turn the satallites off and let them crash.
He's right, we don't need to destroy windows to succeed. Our success will just be that much sweeter if we do though...
This is a good thing though. Firstly, I've got a thing for Wirthian languages and Borland has been keeping the flame going for quite a while. I hope they continue to do so. Pascal is wonderful.
Second, competition is good. VisualAge for Java and Delphi fill an important void in the application development market. No matter how badass a hacker you are, there are a ton of people who spend a ton of money not to be. We need to continue to embrace those people. There are movements to build similar products out of Python and then there is squeak and a good solid Delphi will spur development and provide a ready and working solution for RAD.
Lastly, and perhaps one of the more important reasons is that Delphi has been deployed. There are businesses with substantial amounts of Delphi code in production and they are tied to Windows until there is a Delphi somewhere else. This enables them to move to Linux. Along the same lines, we need to rumble and get IBM to revive "Bart" and port it to Linux. If we can soften the blow of porting your custom apps then we make Linux that much more desirable, particularly in corporate America where it is already infiltrating as a web, print and file server.
You're correct, java in implementation is flawed, but so is C++. Perl and Python are exceptions simply because there is no choice in implementation. Presumably java will settle down some, maybe it won't.
I meant the language itself. Java, as a language, is dramatically more simple than C++. It's stunning. Not to be defamatory, but python is the same way compared to perl. Both python and java are getting lot's of attention and hype right now. Perl and C++ have a lot in common in that they've evolved over years and lot's of new things have been added to them while trying to remain backwardly compatible. There is a lot to learn to know "all of C++" or "all of perl"
Where do you see programming and languages going? C++ and Perl are both very rich in feature and complex and they seem to be running on less steam than some other more simple lanaguages right now, Java and Python seem to be the darlings. It seems like schools are all teaching java right now and C++ is becoming less of a resume feature than it was a few years back. Do you see a trend towards simplicity? Do you see programming becoming a a divided discipline (IS programming and then system programming, or something along those lines) with CS majors doing the heavy lifting with C++ and IS or non-CS type people doing other stuff with java or cool or something else that is much easier to learn.
Another question, how do you see funtional programming playing a role in the future? Do you think functional programming is an acadmeic fad or a niche market for special purposes like Ada is used for?
I'm not challenging you so much as I can't think of anything that PERL let's you do that Python prohibits from from.
I think the way I see the differences between PERL and Python is that Larry has added everything including the kitchen sink to PERL. Guido is very careful about adding new things to python. (part of this may have to do with popularity, PERL is huge and has had far more developers than python has, should python's popularity continue to grow maybe it will become more complex) If there is some programming construct and you want it, it's probably in perl. It has to be compelling enough to be added to python. Python had a fairly complete design idea at the start where PERL was simple and stuff keeps getting thrown in to PERL which adds complexity.
I think the tersness of PERL code and the obfuscated feel of it (IMO) are a result of the syntax and how so many things have been added to the language, not that it some how liberates you to code things that python doesn't in the name of performance. As has already been said, PERL needs to simmer a little, the best of PERL needs to be sifted out and morphed into something else.
It's not sloppiness so much as what C++ let's you get away with. You start building objects and then you have to communicate between them. Do you provide references to objects or do you provide copies of the objects and then update them all when one changes? Once you start leaking references, if they go far enough, problem errupt.
On large systems, master C++ programmers, master programmers have had these problems in real world applications. It's not so much not knowing when to delete objects so much as making sure you delete enough pieces when you delete them. If you delete an object that is referenced by another then you're going to have a crash. If you delete an object but not the references it contains then you have to have another reference to each of those objects and you have to know what you're down to the last reference so you can delete the object.
I agree about the sloppiness of thought associated with java and GC but that laziness and the willingness to be sloppy is there regardless of whether or not the programmers are using GC. TakeGC away and they may be a little bit more careful but they've already shown that they are willing to be that lazy and sloppy.
Now that Andover has some deeper pockets and slashdot is gaining some pretty good popularity in the mainstream (or at least what seems to be the mainstream to me) do you fear that anything could change?
For example, you have a rather weak sounding disclaimer and there is a ton of editorial content in the messages that are posted. Yahoo has been involved in several cases where companies have felt wronged by anonymous posting. Do you worry that somebody could try to sue? Have you taken measures to help track down posters, even ACs, in the event that somebody wants to track down a poster of negative comments? I know several sites that do IP tracking and some cookie stuff to try and keep track of the anonymous people. You guys have had a strong record for defending anonymity and making changes to try and keep anonymous posting viable, has Andover or wealth changed any of that? You're a much bigger target now, has that changed anything? (I'm not trying to learn ways to circumvent things or anything, I'm just curious if you guys are really totally free to operate as normal, if you are then I will be the first to say that you may have the greatest job on the planet.) If Bolomag Corp. (Big Oranization with Lots Of Money And Guns) wants to track down that AC that said their products were unsafe and dropped the law suit word, would you help them? What if it was believed to be a Bolomag employee? I think this consists of one question.
Secondly, I view slashdot and a pretty cutting edge weblog/pseudo-portal. It has really defined the medium to me. I've watched over the years as slashdot has gone from a nerd news index (meta-news?) that essentially pointed to news articles that were about developments that nerds would find interesting in to more content development with the Katz articles, book reviews, and features and interviews and then customizable content with the slashboxes and the custom page creation. Slashdot is becoming a media. Is there any pressure to direct that? Alternatives to the weblog (irc.slashdot.org?) haven't really surfaced but do you think that there will be pressure to move slashdot to the "next thing" when it does? Andover has a hot commodity and they clearly wouldn't want it to lose its edge anymore than they would want to ruin it by making it corporate.
Then third, how does the editorial process work? From the viewer's prespective, slashdot seems to be fresh, interesting, prograssive and it is continually being adjusted and tweaked. Does someone have ultimate say over what is done? Is it a democracy? Have there been any big rows? Is there a policy or plan for when there is desire to do something that isn't "slashdot?"
Re:Whatever happened to "fitting on a floppy"?
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Mozilla M12 Released
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· Score: 2
It fits on those LS120 floppies. What were you thinking? A 1.4M floppy? hahahaha silly rabbit.
I feel like a total tool for the man now that I look back at how often I've pimped this keyboard on all the keyboard related articles... but I love the thing. It's one of the few computer hardware products that I truly love and endorse.
I've never had RSI, never had much more than stiff hands and wrists, usually after doing something stupid like waterskiing all day or landing on my wrists during a bike wreck or something. When it get's cold my wrists fatigue and get a bit stiffer, nothing much though and it goes away with warmth. (for some reason it's like 58 degrees in my office somedays) Never had pain. I'm a touch typist. Raised with a chiropractor and I pay close attention to my body and how I feel; my doc is amazing too, she notices all sorts of little things. I have had parents that have preached the virtues of good ergonomics, I've used wrist rests and generally had decent work areas for my computers. That's my history.
When I got our of college and got my first good salery job I decided it was time to invest in my health a little since this is my business. I wanted to go top-of-the-line for ergonomics, no reason to screw around anymore and no excuses. I could afford it and the stuff was either good for you or I was going to end up with some nice stuff that wasn't bad for me. I bought a desk, a chair and while I was at the place (KARE products in Boulder Colorado) I noticed the keyboard and became slightly captivated. I thought about it, it's a pretty pricey keyboard and I finally decided I'd give it a whirl, I was still high on the getting-paid-well-for-the-first-time euphoria.
I believe the model I purchased, the Contour Classic with dual legends and the foot peddle (essentially it's the second best model, they have a better model with more memory for programming it) cost about $600 retail. I got it quite a bit cheaper since I was blowing a good chunk of money with those guys already. It was still more money than I had ever spent on an input device before. I know you can order them for as cheaply as $200-$220 for the basic non-programmable qwerty model. Still a bit pricey for you average geek, but completely reasonable for such a high quality keyboard.
After having it for about a year, I can say with all honesty that I'd pay $600 for the keyboard again in a second. I never had wrist problems and my hands feel noticably better after long typing sessions. They just feel more relaxed and comfortable. You can notice the difference, it feels better. I was amazed because I always type with my wrists straight and have pretty good form. I can only imagine what it must feel like if you type in pain. This is a very good keyboard, it's a bit pricey but I recommend it if you can afford it. Even if you can't afford it, it's worth thinking about, maybe buy a cheaper video card and a smaller drive this time around so you can get the keyboard, it will last you through multiple computers.
It was a little odd for about a week but I type faster now than I did before, my hands feel better, you can program it if you want (I've done a few emacs helpers.) It's a high quality keyboard, it's very configurable (you can make it click or not, it beeps when you press capslock or you can turn it off, you can program any key to do whatever you want), it has columnar keys instead of offset ones so it's easy to learn to type on them, the keys are shaped nicely and the action is good. Initially I thought the action was a little weak compared to the IBM keyboards I used to use but I like the action a lot now, it's a touch slower and softer than IBM action. With the IBM action (not the chicklet keyboards, the ka-chunk keyboards) you kind of push on a key and after a thrushhold it sort of drops on you, I find myself hammering a lot on IBM keyboards, for the longest time this was the desired feel for keyboards because it is like using a typewriter and I grew up with it. The contour action is steady through out the full keystroke, it initially feels slower since there is resistence the full stroke but I have noticed that I hammer less and type softer now, with the softer typing I find that my hands are more nimble and I can type quicker and go for much longer periods and it is just more comfortable.
I got the Dvorak supporting model and run it in QWERTY still. I was going to switch but haven't since they haven't upgraded me at work yet and I didn't want to do one at home and one at work. With the columnar keys and thumb keys I think my typing distribution is pretty good, I don't focus on a few fingers for most of my typing. The tilde, bracket and brace positioning are partially responsible for that too, I think my coding speed suffered for a while while I got used to that but not much. Each finger seems to carry a pretty good amount of the load and I never have to reach too far with any finger. I don't know what I'd get out of Dvorak, I still may switch but I'm not as compelled.
The function keys would be my least favorite part of the keyboard. They are a row of smaller keys across the top. They have a different feel than all the other keys, that spongy kind of calculator key feel. It bothered me a lot at first but not so much now, mostly because I don't use them for much. They are a little offset from the numeric keys and I thought it made more sense to have them lined up. Not that big of a deal though, if you're a Linux user then you probably don't rely on the function keys that much and you program them for macros when you do use them. The palm pads are also not as easy to come buy as I would like, but they aren't hard to get. I don't play many games, the cursor keys are split with up and down being on the right hand and left and right being on the left hand. They aren't in the "T" formation. I used to use an old apple with that kind of layout and so it doesn't bother me but it might take some getting used to if your a cursor key freak or if you paly a lot of games. I kind of like the emacs control-P, control-n, control-f, control-b for a lot of my cursor navigation but I use the cursor keys for about 40% of it too and I don't miss the "T"
It's all white with a blue home row, it looks pretty sharp, it doesn't contrast too much with anything. It's a nice conversation piece at times. The typing is amazing though. It's a really comfortable keyboard. It works with PS/2, AT, and Mac connections, you can get a USB adaptor. Foot peddle is optional and YMMV, I wouldn't get it if I could do it all again but I know a few people who love it.
I'm not sure what else I can think of to say about a keyboard. I really like it a lot. I really think it is worth trying out if you do a lot of coding or typing. It is your health that you're dealing with. It costs more but maybe you're boss will pick it up. There aren't too many hardware products that I will really stand behind but this is one of them, it's wonderful.
This has been done hundreds if not thousands of times. I don't think anyone is bashing these guys so much as taking issue with the claims and the attention that this is getting. Anyone who has ever developed a decent sized application on DOS essentially wrote their own OS. A friend and I even did a similar project in about 1989, we operated under the philosophy that a) assembly was fast, b) the proper way to design an OS is to "start at the boot sector" (that's what you do when you're 16) Sure enough, we got it to boot and run, you could even run little assembly programs for it. It did everything DOS did except run DOS applications, what fun it was. Ours was pretty fast too, I take exception to their claims that they made the fastest OS ever. They need to get in line because not just did I write a pretty damn fast OS, but I wrote the world's fastest "hello world" to run on it! They haven't done anything that is terribly significant. There are tons of these projects, lot's of people have done it before, they just put together a fancy web page and are trying to get some hype. Hell, man, you should see the UNIX kernels I wrote in college. Y'All Nix was my favorite. (Y'all is the plural of "You" in case you were wondering) Man, I got an A on the project and had a mountain of fun, lemme put together a webpage and let you all download it... I'll also put up NachOS in case you guys want to get really giggy with it, these are new OSes baby and they are protected memory, multitasking, the whole nine yards. Y'All Nix even comes with my own shell.. It's just like bash only really really really light weight so it runs *fast* beause it's not so bloated. While I'm at it, I wrote a few compilers in college too...
The OS isn't too exciting on its own. If they invented something new then I might be more excited or more willing to give them some more credit. Woop-dee-doo, they wrote a new version of DOS. Let me be the first to thank them for their work and congratulate them on this awesome accomplishment.
Seriously though, since the 1990's began the OS has moved from a blackbox produced in the white tours down to something your motivated hacker can reasonably get started in his spare time. There are a bunch of projects on the web, most aren't significant. Some might be. As a whole we no longer rely on IBM, Apple, Microsoft, etc. to provide the OS as they see fit to provide it for us. This is good. The next step is to start innovating, creating, and advancing the science. There are enough projects out there that hopefully some of them will start to become technology test beds rather than knockoff projects and recreates. If we were to put Linux, BSD and eventually maybe Hurd on the top of the stack and call those our production kernels, then we can use V2, EROS, ReactOS, Fiasco, GNUMach, L4, and all the others as testbeds to create new ideas and try new things out. Then I could say, congratulations to these guys and mean it. Unless they have some other plans and this is just the 0.01 release, it looks to me like they are trying to get to where DOS was about 20 years ago and they are still a little bit short of that goal.
I love this space stuff. Mars in particular. Last time they did one of these, July 4 a few years back, it was killing me. The radio silence thing during the landing just kills me. I keep thinking that the lander is going to break or something. I absolutley love the photos and the data they gather but the landing process sucks, at least from a spectator's perspective.
This got me to thinking. The photos aren't great, they are good but they aren't awesome. Regardless of our record, I think the landing process is error prone. The landers don't last too long. The focus of their coverage is also extremely limited, Likewise, we can do insane stuff with spy satallites, like seeing through water and dirt like they did with the Nile river. Anyone want to start a petition to get an older spy sat donated to NASA? a 15 year old sat. should be far better than what they are landing, not terribly useful to the NRO anymore and putting it into place should be relatively cheap and assuming that they use metric units it should be a piece of cake. Then we could have high resolution photos from all sorts of places on Mars and with ground penetrating radar and photography we could look deeper than the current lander is going to look. Plus it would last for years and we could examine thousands of Martian locations we wouldn't get to examine the Martian dirt but I would think that our results would be just as good if not better. Plus they'd end up declassifying some more infor on what our spy sats can do...
I've been seeing this animated groovin' pengiun wearing sunglasses. It's raytraced. Make it a bunch bigger and then put a special paper cover on the 'zine that has that ridged plastic animation effect like the toys that come in cracker-jacks. So you can tile the cover from side to side and watch the penguin groove. Cool and retro.
Can a software company or a movie or record company get a tax break because of projected losses due to piracy?
Can they get tax breaks for actions they take to curb those losses?
The simple truth is that movies and CD are usually sold and rented cheaply enough that it doesn't make a lot of sense to pirate them. I can see a few people with some sort of collecting fetish pirating a bunch of DVDs because they have to "own a copy" of a lot of movies, we're talking about a very small minority though.
Blank CDs cost about a dollar a piece and blank DVDs cost a bit more. Plus you have to read the music off the CD on to a drive and the write it back and hope nothing goes wrong in the process. By the time the whole process is done with, I'd rather just pay the $15 for the CD or the $1-$3 and rent the movie instead of giving up an hour of my life and $1, plus I get the lyrics and pictures and stuff that come with it. Why isn't the industry attacking the problem that way? Make better packaging and include more art work and pictures with CDs and DVDs so that there is some non-piratable value-added and give people more insentive to buy the original. They could even do something like putting front-row tickets in a few CDs so you can "win" something by buying the original, it would cost them next to nothing. Unless of course they want to keep inflated numbers for their "losses" due to piracy.
With Perl and Python, most of the meat is still in C++ or C. All the regular expression stuff is C code, highly optimized C code. I haven't done any scientific benchmarks but I have yet to see a situation where a C++ program would solidily outperform a perl script doing common CGI stuff.
Between the time to develop, the bandwidth constraints, and the library functions you'd have to do some very specific profiling to show a C++ or C programming significantly out performing a perl script for typical CGI applications and a lot of that can probably be offset by the fact that you can embed python and perl interpreters into apache which cuts the startup time for your scripts (by as much as 1000% in some cases, or so I've heard) since they don't have to spawn an interpreter and start it up.
Say that the C++ program was twice as fast (probably not, but assuming it was) how many hits would you have to get to saturate enough of your server capacity to justify porting your perl to C++? Processors are remarkably cheap compared to bandwidth anymore. Maybe if you run yahoo or infoseek or something it is justified to code all your CGIs in C or C++ but I think the typical web server can easily get away with perl or python.
What's your opinion on the current state-of-the-art in cryptography? Do you think the public sector has caught up to the NSA and the governments of the world yet or do you think they still hold a commanding lead?
DES and papers by Don Coppersmith show that the NSA and at least a few private researchers have known about some techniques, like differential cryptanalysis for over a decade before the general public learned of them. With the current boom in interest in cryptography and judging by the designs of current ciphers like Coppersmith's SEAL and skipjack, it seems plausible to assume that the gap has been closed substantially. How big do you think the gap is between the NSA and the public and what hurdles to you see in closing it if you believe that the NSA still knows vastly more than the public about cryptography?
(I mean the cryptographer public when I say "public," not the masses.)
Thanks again for your wonderful books. Any plans for AC 3rd edition? Maybe with AES covered?
Windows and Wince will never be opensourced. MS might open up the source code to more people but they will never opensource the source code. Just like solaris and java.
It goes against everything that MS culture is based on. It simply doesn't make sense for them, they have lousy support, they are moving towards a leasing scheme for software licensing (pay-per-use is more likely than opensource) and they are too paranoid and they think they have something worth stealing.
A Linux version of Office comes out before an opensource version of windows does.
Chewbacca is a great character, one of my favorites, but it's still weak. He was never a central character. They are trying to mix things up by killing someone but they don't want to really mix things up. They should kill Luke or Han Solo or something. They killed Spock in Startrek (they kind of brought him back, of course) they didn't kill Uhura or Sulu, they killed Spock one of the 3 main characters.
They killed Superman (brought him back too, but he was different) but it was superman, it wasn't Lois Lane or one of his superfriend sidekicks, the main character died. Never killed Batman but came close a few times, they probably don't need to kill him because they are willing to change the batman comics, they've killed Robin about 6 times though, Robin never comes back because they really kill him. Batman is just too badass anyways.
ah yeah, the "Contour Classic Dual Legend" It has been my preferred weapon of choice for about 18 months now, I love it, worth every penny. It's hard to justify, this keyboard can cost 10x more than other keyboards but it is worth it.
Hard for me to say much about Dvorak in particular since my typing has been much more comfortable because of the keyboard alone, my speed, comfort and accuracy have all gone up though.
I'll be the first to say that some metric standards seem to be pretty arbitrary. Like the meter: it's about 1/10,000,000th of the distance from the equator to the northpole or if you're a modern person it's how far light can travel in something like 3*10^-11 seconds in a vacuum. That's logical. Of course, seconds are entirely arbitrary, I've always thought time was the bane of the metric system to begin with. It's rather remarkable how bastardized a number of concepts have become because of our sense of time, ~360 days in a year => 360 degrees in a circle =>... => a meter is the distance light travels in a 3*10^-11th of a second.
Degrees make a little bit more sense, 0 when water freezes, 100 when it boils, the water part is arbitrary and 100 doesn't exactly follow the whole "10" theme but it's not too far off. If you're trying to make a standard for the ages you have to consider the amount of water in the universe, it's a rarity but it is theorized to be a needed reagent for life so maybe it makes sense. I can't help but think that absolute zero should be zero and the temperature at which helium liquifies in a vacuum should be 1, but that's just me, that stuff should be the same everywhere water doesn't always boil at 100 degrees.
Even with the oddities, it's still great. Metric won't do jack for us when we have to talk to aliens but it's amazingly simple for us to deal with. Anyhow, we missed the boat because of the new millenium coming up. Jubilee 2000 and other organizations are making a huge impact with their cause, 3rd world debt could very well be forgiven. The Euro is the new currency of Europe, just in time for 2000. We should have started metric-US-2000 and made the big push the convert over.
Okay, so the 5 point message is one proclaiming that we need to mobilize since they are trying to take our rights away, we're under "attack," they want us for our minds (that's great Sherlock, isn't that what everybody wants? something about that whole "work for money" concept and skills.)
Then there are at least 2 articles that mention dehumanizing nazi propaganda and separatist bullshit.
Are you guys paranoid or what? Of course you don't fit in. You won't so long as you believe that crap. Don't autistics have a false sense of an incorrect sense of themselves? They're egocentric, they don't relate to others, they don't have fully developed social models. I'm not sure where or when the war started you're in started but you're fitting the bill perfectly if you really believe that. Simply because someone pulled the "autism" label out of the dictionary they are trying to limit your freedom or dehumanize you? They are simply trying to understand us, "austistic" may be the best label for us right now. Big deal, they're right! They are trying to understand us, I repeat, they are trying to understand us, say that to yourself a few times. We don't fit in, never have, we're socially inept, socially impaired, what ever. Some of us have rationalized it to and believe that "we don't need society or social interaction" (psychologists have a word for that too, "denial" and in some cases "delusional") They are trying to understand us, we're a little pop culture fasicnation right now and what do some of us do? They freak out. The society we never fit in with is trying to understand us, they're trying to figure our why we don't fit in, they're extending the open hand of "we know what it's like," they're try to fit us in.
Is that so bad? Do you really want to fit in? We never will as it is but I'd rather not fit in and have everyone know why than just not fit in at all. Hell, pop culture is fascinated by us right now, enjoy it.
Slashdot Mirror
In opensource, competition is very important and it will become more important in the future, we need it to keep moving forward. What we also need to do is to keep components as components and let each package focus on being the package that it is and nothing more and then tie packages together with things like bonobo, kobjects, xpcom and opendoc like technologies.
That's sweet. That is like business school poetry or something. Or maybe something Data would say. Where do they get that kind of stuff, is there a book I can get? I'd like to start including phrases like that in my vocabulary and probably some of my poetry.
Does it concern you that moves like you made against napster make you guys look old?
I can say that being the cryotpgeek that I am, if I was going to be a thief and take something I'd want to take an Enigma machine. It would be a bad ass piece to have in my study. My hat is off to the gent for ripping it off. At least he didn't take something useless like a painting or some jewel laced golden artifact, he stole something that was calssified for years.
That's funny. I'm going to start walking up to Brits and Canadians and asking them how things are going 'down under' Then asking "are you sure you're not Australian" when they say that they aren't. I think this is a prime chance for Jeremy, he can live a debaucherous life and pretend to be Austrailian and make the whole lot of 'em look bad.
As it goes, last Tuesday they talked about Irridium because some guy was bailing on them, it's the guy who owns vodafon. Anyhow, if nobody buys irridium then they will stop driving the satallites and after a while they will all enter the Earth's atmosphere and burn up. A few of them might make it a while but they will all suffer the same fate eventually. CNBC made it sound like on March 17 they will turn the satallites off and just let them drift.
It's really kind of a bummer, I love the idea of a universal mobile phone. There are tons of applications for it. Irridium has been mismanaged since the get-go though. Nobody is going to be a $3000 portable phone and pay $8 a minute for service except for in the most extreme circumstances or they are the most reckless rich guys around. From what I've heard the line quality wasn't so hot either. My PCS phone works just about everywhere I've been in this country and I could easily buy a few more and use call forwarding in other jurisdictions if I needed it for much less than Irridium. There are also alternative satallite world phone ventures that are going on. I also think there are some laws in the US about satallite communication. I think NORAD or some other government agency will track your satallite and possibly even guide it for you if you for some small fee, that fee being something like they have access to your uplinks. I'm not 100% sure on it, but I suspect that once Irridium shuts down they will make sure the satallites cannot be used by anybody. I think there are a number of fears about people sniffing intelligence data to our spy satallites or determining where our spy satallites are. Perhaps someone else in the know knows the details on this.
Whatever the reasons, I'm pretty sure they will just turn the satallites off and let them crash.
This is a good thing though. Firstly, I've got a thing for Wirthian languages and Borland has been keeping the flame going for quite a while. I hope they continue to do so. Pascal is wonderful.
Second, competition is good. VisualAge for Java and Delphi fill an important void in the application development market. No matter how badass a hacker you are, there are a ton of people who spend a ton of money not to be. We need to continue to embrace those people. There are movements to build similar products out of Python and then there is squeak and a good solid Delphi will spur development and provide a ready and working solution for RAD.
Lastly, and perhaps one of the more important reasons is that Delphi has been deployed. There are businesses with substantial amounts of Delphi code in production and they are tied to Windows until there is a Delphi somewhere else. This enables them to move to Linux. Along the same lines, we need to rumble and get IBM to revive "Bart" and port it to Linux. If we can soften the blow of porting your custom apps then we make Linux that much more desirable, particularly in corporate America where it is already infiltrating as a web, print and file server.
I meant the language itself. Java, as a language, is dramatically more simple than C++. It's stunning. Not to be defamatory, but python is the same way compared to perl. Both python and java are getting lot's of attention and hype right now. Perl and C++ have a lot in common in that they've evolved over years and lot's of new things have been added to them while trying to remain backwardly compatible. There is a lot to learn to know "all of C++" or "all of perl"
Another question, how do you see funtional programming playing a role in the future? Do you think functional programming is an acadmeic fad or a niche market for special purposes like Ada is used for?
I'm not challenging you so much as I can't think of anything that PERL let's you do that Python prohibits from from.
I think the way I see the differences between PERL and Python is that Larry has added everything including the kitchen sink to PERL. Guido is very careful about adding new things to python. (part of this may have to do with popularity, PERL is huge and has had far more developers than python has, should python's popularity continue to grow maybe it will become more complex) If there is some programming construct and you want it, it's probably in perl. It has to be compelling enough to be added to python. Python had a fairly complete design idea at the start where PERL was simple and stuff keeps getting thrown in to PERL which adds complexity.
I think the tersness of PERL code and the obfuscated feel of it (IMO) are a result of the syntax and how so many things have been added to the language, not that it some how liberates you to code things that python doesn't in the name of performance. As has already been said, PERL needs to simmer a little, the best of PERL needs to be sifted out and morphed into something else.
On large systems, master C++ programmers, master programmers have had these problems in real world applications. It's not so much not knowing when to delete objects so much as making sure you delete enough pieces when you delete them. If you delete an object that is referenced by another then you're going to have a crash. If you delete an object but not the references it contains then you have to have another reference to each of those objects and you have to know what you're down to the last reference so you can delete the object.
I agree about the sloppiness of thought associated with java and GC but that laziness and the willingness to be sloppy is there regardless of whether or not the programmers are using GC. TakeGC away and they may be a little bit more careful but they've already shown that they are willing to be that lazy and sloppy.
For example, you have a rather weak sounding disclaimer and there is a ton of editorial content in the messages that are posted. Yahoo has been involved in several cases where companies have felt wronged by anonymous posting. Do you worry that somebody could try to sue? Have you taken measures to help track down posters, even ACs, in the event that somebody wants to track down a poster of negative comments? I know several sites that do IP tracking and some cookie stuff to try and keep track of the anonymous people. You guys have had a strong record for defending anonymity and making changes to try and keep anonymous posting viable, has Andover or wealth changed any of that? You're a much bigger target now, has that changed anything? (I'm not trying to learn ways to circumvent things or anything, I'm just curious if you guys are really totally free to operate as normal, if you are then I will be the first to say that you may have the greatest job on the planet.) If Bolomag Corp. (Big Oranization with Lots Of Money And Guns) wants to track down that AC that said their products were unsafe and dropped the law suit word, would you help them? What if it was believed to be a Bolomag employee? I think this consists of one question.
Secondly, I view slashdot and a pretty cutting edge weblog/pseudo-portal. It has really defined the medium to me. I've watched over the years as slashdot has gone from a nerd news index (meta-news?) that essentially pointed to news articles that were about developments that nerds would find interesting in to more content development with the Katz articles, book reviews, and features and interviews and then customizable content with the slashboxes and the custom page creation. Slashdot is becoming a media. Is there any pressure to direct that? Alternatives to the weblog (irc.slashdot.org?) haven't really surfaced but do you think that there will be pressure to move slashdot to the "next thing" when it does? Andover has a hot commodity and they clearly wouldn't want it to lose its edge anymore than they would want to ruin it by making it corporate.
Then third, how does the editorial process work? From the viewer's prespective, slashdot seems to be fresh, interesting, prograssive and it is continually being adjusted and tweaked. Does someone have ultimate say over what is done? Is it a democracy? Have there been any big rows? Is there a policy or plan for when there is desire to do something that isn't "slashdot?"
It fits on those LS120 floppies. What were you thinking? A 1.4M floppy? hahahaha silly rabbit.
I've never had RSI, never had much more than stiff hands and wrists, usually after doing something stupid like waterskiing all day or landing on my wrists during a bike wreck or something. When it get's cold my wrists fatigue and get a bit stiffer, nothing much though and it goes away with warmth. (for some reason it's like 58 degrees in my office somedays) Never had pain. I'm a touch typist. Raised with a chiropractor and I pay close attention to my body and how I feel; my doc is amazing too, she notices all sorts of little things. I have had parents that have preached the virtues of good ergonomics, I've used wrist rests and generally had decent work areas for my computers. That's my history.
When I got our of college and got my first good salery job I decided it was time to invest in my health a little since this is my business. I wanted to go top-of-the-line for ergonomics, no reason to screw around anymore and no excuses. I could afford it and the stuff was either good for you or I was going to end up with some nice stuff that wasn't bad for me. I bought a desk, a chair and while I was at the place (KARE products in Boulder Colorado) I noticed the keyboard and became slightly captivated. I thought about it, it's a pretty pricey keyboard and I finally decided I'd give it a whirl, I was still high on the getting-paid-well-for-the-first-time euphoria.
I believe the model I purchased, the Contour Classic with dual legends and the foot peddle (essentially it's the second best model, they have a better model with more memory for programming it) cost about $600 retail. I got it quite a bit cheaper since I was blowing a good chunk of money with those guys already. It was still more money than I had ever spent on an input device before. I know you can order them for as cheaply as $200-$220 for the basic non-programmable qwerty model. Still a bit pricey for you average geek, but completely reasonable for such a high quality keyboard.
After having it for about a year, I can say with all honesty that I'd pay $600 for the keyboard again in a second. I never had wrist problems and my hands feel noticably better after long typing sessions. They just feel more relaxed and comfortable. You can notice the difference, it feels better. I was amazed because I always type with my wrists straight and have pretty good form. I can only imagine what it must feel like if you type in pain. This is a very good keyboard, it's a bit pricey but I recommend it if you can afford it. Even if you can't afford it, it's worth thinking about, maybe buy a cheaper video card and a smaller drive this time around so you can get the keyboard, it will last you through multiple computers.
It was a little odd for about a week but I type faster now than I did before, my hands feel better, you can program it if you want (I've done a few emacs helpers.) It's a high quality keyboard, it's very configurable (you can make it click or not, it beeps when you press capslock or you can turn it off, you can program any key to do whatever you want), it has columnar keys instead of offset ones so it's easy to learn to type on them, the keys are shaped nicely and the action is good. Initially I thought the action was a little weak compared to the IBM keyboards I used to use but I like the action a lot now, it's a touch slower and softer than IBM action. With the IBM action (not the chicklet keyboards, the ka-chunk keyboards) you kind of push on a key and after a thrushhold it sort of drops on you, I find myself hammering a lot on IBM keyboards, for the longest time this was the desired feel for keyboards because it is like using a typewriter and I grew up with it. The contour action is steady through out the full keystroke, it initially feels slower since there is resistence the full stroke but I have noticed that I hammer less and type softer now, with the softer typing I find that my hands are more nimble and I can type quicker and go for much longer periods and it is just more comfortable.
I got the Dvorak supporting model and run it in QWERTY still. I was going to switch but haven't since they haven't upgraded me at work yet and I didn't want to do one at home and one at work. With the columnar keys and thumb keys I think my typing distribution is pretty good, I don't focus on a few fingers for most of my typing. The tilde, bracket and brace positioning are partially responsible for that too, I think my coding speed suffered for a while while I got used to that but not much. Each finger seems to carry a pretty good amount of the load and I never have to reach too far with any finger. I don't know what I'd get out of Dvorak, I still may switch but I'm not as compelled.
The function keys would be my least favorite part of the keyboard. They are a row of smaller keys across the top. They have a different feel than all the other keys, that spongy kind of calculator key feel. It bothered me a lot at first but not so much now, mostly because I don't use them for much. They are a little offset from the numeric keys and I thought it made more sense to have them lined up. Not that big of a deal though, if you're a Linux user then you probably don't rely on the function keys that much and you program them for macros when you do use them. The palm pads are also not as easy to come buy as I would like, but they aren't hard to get. I don't play many games, the cursor keys are split with up and down being on the right hand and left and right being on the left hand. They aren't in the "T" formation. I used to use an old apple with that kind of layout and so it doesn't bother me but it might take some getting used to if your a cursor key freak or if you paly a lot of games. I kind of like the emacs control-P, control-n, control-f, control-b for a lot of my cursor navigation but I use the cursor keys for about 40% of it too and I don't miss the "T"
It's all white with a blue home row, it looks pretty sharp, it doesn't contrast too much with anything. It's a nice conversation piece at times. The typing is amazing though. It's a really comfortable keyboard. It works with PS/2, AT, and Mac connections, you can get a USB adaptor. Foot peddle is optional and YMMV, I wouldn't get it if I could do it all again but I know a few people who love it.
I'm not sure what else I can think of to say about a keyboard. I really like it a lot. I really think it is worth trying out if you do a lot of coding or typing. It is your health that you're dealing with. It costs more but maybe you're boss will pick it up. There aren't too many hardware products that I will really stand behind but this is one of them, it's wonderful.
The OS isn't too exciting on its own. If they invented something new then I might be more excited or more willing to give them some more credit. Woop-dee-doo, they wrote a new version of DOS. Let me be the first to thank them for their work and congratulate them on this awesome accomplishment.
Seriously though, since the 1990's began the OS has moved from a blackbox produced in the white tours down to something your motivated hacker can reasonably get started in his spare time. There are a bunch of projects on the web, most aren't significant. Some might be. As a whole we no longer rely on IBM, Apple, Microsoft, etc. to provide the OS as they see fit to provide it for us. This is good. The next step is to start innovating, creating, and advancing the science. There are enough projects out there that hopefully some of them will start to become technology test beds rather than knockoff projects and recreates. If we were to put Linux, BSD and eventually maybe Hurd on the top of the stack and call those our production kernels, then we can use V2, EROS, ReactOS, Fiasco, GNUMach, L4, and all the others as testbeds to create new ideas and try new things out. Then I could say, congratulations to these guys and mean it. Unless they have some other plans and this is just the 0.01 release, it looks to me like they are trying to get to where DOS was about 20 years ago and they are still a little bit short of that goal.
This got me to thinking. The photos aren't great, they are good but they aren't awesome. Regardless of our record, I think the landing process is error prone. The landers don't last too long. The focus of their coverage is also extremely limited, Likewise, we can do insane stuff with spy satallites, like seeing through water and dirt like they did with the Nile river. Anyone want to start a petition to get an older spy sat donated to NASA? a 15 year old sat. should be far better than what they are landing, not terribly useful to the NRO anymore and putting it into place should be relatively cheap and assuming that they use metric units it should be a piece of cake. Then we could have high resolution photos from all sorts of places on Mars and with ground penetrating radar and photography we could look deeper than the current lander is going to look. Plus it would last for years and we could examine thousands of Martian locations we wouldn't get to examine the Martian dirt but I would think that our results would be just as good if not better. Plus they'd end up declassifying some more infor on what our spy sats can do...
I've been seeing this animated groovin' pengiun wearing sunglasses. It's raytraced. Make it a bunch bigger and then put a special paper cover on the 'zine that has that ridged plastic animation effect like the toys that come in cracker-jacks. So you can tile the cover from side to side and watch the penguin groove. Cool and retro.
Can they get tax breaks for actions they take to curb those losses?
The simple truth is that movies and CD are usually sold and rented cheaply enough that it doesn't make a lot of sense to pirate them. I can see a few people with some sort of collecting fetish pirating a bunch of DVDs because they have to "own a copy" of a lot of movies, we're talking about a very small minority though.
Blank CDs cost about a dollar a piece and blank DVDs cost a bit more. Plus you have to read the music off the CD on to a drive and the write it back and hope nothing goes wrong in the process. By the time the whole process is done with, I'd rather just pay the $15 for the CD or the $1-$3 and rent the movie instead of giving up an hour of my life and $1, plus I get the lyrics and pictures and stuff that come with it. Why isn't the industry attacking the problem that way? Make better packaging and include more art work and pictures with CDs and DVDs so that there is some non-piratable value-added and give people more insentive to buy the original. They could even do something like putting front-row tickets in a few CDs so you can "win" something by buying the original, it would cost them next to nothing. Unless of course they want to keep inflated numbers for their "losses" due to piracy.
Between the time to develop, the bandwidth constraints, and the library functions you'd have to do some very specific profiling to show a C++ or C programming significantly out performing a perl script for typical CGI applications and a lot of that can probably be offset by the fact that you can embed python and perl interpreters into apache which cuts the startup time for your scripts (by as much as 1000% in some cases, or so I've heard) since they don't have to spawn an interpreter and start it up.
Say that the C++ program was twice as fast (probably not, but assuming it was) how many hits would you have to get to saturate enough of your server capacity to justify porting your perl to C++? Processors are remarkably cheap compared to bandwidth anymore. Maybe if you run yahoo or infoseek or something it is justified to code all your CGIs in C or C++ but I think the typical web server can easily get away with perl or python.
DES and papers by Don Coppersmith show that the NSA and at least a few private researchers have known about some techniques, like differential cryptanalysis for over a decade before the general public learned of them. With the current boom in interest in cryptography and judging by the designs of current ciphers like Coppersmith's SEAL and skipjack, it seems plausible to assume that the gap has been closed substantially. How big do you think the gap is between the NSA and the public and what hurdles to you see in closing it if you believe that the NSA still knows vastly more than the public about cryptography?
(I mean the cryptographer public when I say "public," not the masses.)
Thanks again for your wonderful books. Any plans for AC 3rd edition? Maybe with AES covered?
It goes against everything that MS culture is based on. It simply doesn't make sense for them, they have lousy support, they are moving towards a leasing scheme for software licensing (pay-per-use is more likely than opensource) and they are too paranoid and they think they have something worth stealing.
A Linux version of Office comes out before an opensource version of windows does.
They killed Superman (brought him back too, but he was different) but it was superman, it wasn't Lois Lane or one of his superfriend sidekicks, the main character died. Never killed Batman but came close a few times, they probably don't need to kill him because they are willing to change the batman comics, they've killed Robin about 6 times though, Robin never comes back because they really kill him. Batman is just too badass anyways.
Hard for me to say much about Dvorak in particular since my typing has been much more comfortable because of the keyboard alone, my speed, comfort and accuracy have all gone up though.
Do you run with the peddle configuration?
Degrees make a little bit more sense, 0 when water freezes, 100 when it boils, the water part is arbitrary and 100 doesn't exactly follow the whole "10" theme but it's not too far off. If you're trying to make a standard for the ages you have to consider the amount of water in the universe, it's a rarity but it is theorized to be a needed reagent for life so maybe it makes sense. I can't help but think that absolute zero should be zero and the temperature at which helium liquifies in a vacuum should be 1, but that's just me, that stuff should be the same everywhere water doesn't always boil at 100 degrees.
Even with the oddities, it's still great. Metric won't do jack for us when we have to talk to aliens but it's amazingly simple for us to deal with. Anyhow, we missed the boat because of the new millenium coming up. Jubilee 2000 and other organizations are making a huge impact with their cause, 3rd world debt could very well be forgiven. The Euro is the new currency of Europe, just in time for 2000. We should have started metric-US-2000 and made the big push the convert over.
Then there are at least 2 articles that mention dehumanizing nazi propaganda and separatist bullshit.
Are you guys paranoid or what? Of course you don't fit in. You won't so long as you believe that crap. Don't autistics have a false sense of an incorrect sense of themselves? They're egocentric, they don't relate to others, they don't have fully developed social models. I'm not sure where or when the war started you're in started but you're fitting the bill perfectly if you really believe that. Simply because someone pulled the "autism" label out of the dictionary they are trying to limit your freedom or dehumanize you? They are simply trying to understand us, "austistic" may be the best label for us right now. Big deal, they're right! They are trying to understand us, I repeat, they are trying to understand us, say that to yourself a few times. We don't fit in, never have, we're socially inept, socially impaired, what ever. Some of us have rationalized it to and believe that "we don't need society or social interaction" (psychologists have a word for that too, "denial" and in some cases "delusional") They are trying to understand us, we're a little pop culture fasicnation right now and what do some of us do? They freak out. The society we never fit in with is trying to understand us, they're trying to figure our why we don't fit in, they're extending the open hand of "we know what it's like," they're try to fit us in.
Is that so bad? Do you really want to fit in? We never will as it is but I'd rather not fit in and have everyone know why than just not fit in at all. Hell, pop culture is fascinated by us right now, enjoy it.